


The Girl With The Loaded Handgun

by lapsi



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018), Millennium Trilogy - Stieg Larsson
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Crossover, F/F, One Shot, Post The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 01:28:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,813
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15741339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapsi/pseuds/lapsi
Summary: Salander is lighting a cigarette as she wanders through to her kitchen in the oversized, dilapidated t-shirt. It’s a warm morning, not that she ever worries about Stockholm’s external temperature given her apartment’s incredibly expensive central heating. On the back of her neck, a vivid pattern of upright hairs spring to attention. Her body knows something she doesn’t. She turns sharply, and finds her dining room occupied.“Hello, little cousin,” the woman sitting at her table says, in Russian accented English.(this one shot has been sitting around in my fanfic folder unpublished for too damn long so here we go)





	The Girl With The Loaded Handgun

Salander is lighting a cigarette as she wanders through to her kitchen in the oversized, dilapidated t-shirt. It’s a warm morning, not that she ever worries about Stockholm’s external temperature given her apartment’s incredibly expensive central heating. On the back of her neck, a vivid pattern of upright hairs spring to attention. Her body knows something she doesn’t. She turns sharply, and finds her dining room occupied.  
  
“Hello, little cousin,” the woman sitting at her table says, in Russian accented English.  
  
She is tall and broad shouldered, but dwarfed by the green corduroy double-breasted blazer she’s wearing. It is open across the chest. Underneath, a flared jumpsuit, velvety black. Her shoes are kicked off, and she has one knee up, in a childish lounge against the rarely used dining table.  
  
Salander takes two steps back, reaching for the first improvised weapon in her peripheral vision: an empty vodka bottle sitting on the sink needing recycling. She hears the click of a gun, and sets it down on the bench behind her, raising her hands before she turns.  
  
“This is a very nice apartment. Expensive security. A real trouble to get in undetected. You make a lot of money. Do you kill people?”  
  
“Some people. Assholes who break into my apartment,” Lisbeth says, dark eyes narrowing.  
  
“Does that pay well?”  
  
“There’s deeper satisfaction than financial reward.”  
  
“You should try getting paid actual money. It makes it much more gratifying. You only _think_ you’re getting enough reward,” the stranger says perfectly casually. “I didn’t want to wake you making coffee. Would you mind?”  
  
Lisbeth scowls. “I’m not going to make you a fucking coffee.”  
  
“Fine, fine. Can you teach me how? I haven't used a machine like yours. I don't want to make bad coffee.”  
  
“What do you want?” Salander asks, affect flat. “Don’t say a fucking coffee.”  
  
“I want some help, cousin.”  
  
“I don’t know you.”  
  
“You almost got killed by your shitheel father, and your gigantic freak brother, and you didn’t want to look into your family tree?”  
  
“You’re not my family.”  
  
The tall woman in front of her smiles. “My mother’s maiden name was Zalachenko. I think I prefer that to Salander. Salander sounds wet and slimy. Like a newt.”  
  
Lisbeth’s teeth clench tight. “Even if you’re not lying, which I think you are, I don’t want to help you.”  
  
“No? Not even for Mikhail’s sake? Or Annika’s, or Miriam’s, or Holger’s. Hm, am I missing anyone? You don’t have so many friends. I don’t have many friends either, so no judgment from me. I had a friend, and she stabbed me. Friends are a bad idea.”  
  
Lisbeth’s hand spiders its way back towards the bottle of vodka.  
  
“Stop that, you silly thing,” Villanelle says, in perfect Swedish.  
  
“Fine! Fine, I’ll help you. What’s your name?” Salander says, switching to Swedish.  
  
“My name? Call me Villanelle. I ne--”  
  
She’s just started to put the gun away when the empty bottle flies across the room towards her.  
  
It would have hit her clean in the throat, but that the blonde flickers backwards as if performing a ballet turn. The unamused woman watches it smash on the wall behind her, and then with her gun pointed straight into Salander’s chest, she stalks forward. “You think because we’re family, I won’t put a bullet in you, little girl?” she asks.  
  
Lisbeth raises her hands. This woman is fast. Normally, she’d count on her ability to get the gun away from an assailant one-on-one. In this situation, she suspects it would be a stupid move. And if she does something stupid, and ends up dead, any one of her friends might be next. “What do you need done?” she placates.  
  
“I need you to find a woman for me.”  
  
“Just that?”  
  
“A man who is good at your kind of nerdy bullshit helped her hide. I thought, ah, my little cousin I have been keeping track off is good with computers. Perhaps she will help me. But no. She throws an empty vodka bottle at me. Cheap vodka,” Villanelle says, the latter fact seeming far more offensive than the attempted assault. She stops at the bench, sitting at a counter stool in a different, but equally bizarre, posture. “I also need you to make me a coffee. Real beans, not instant. I saw them in your freezer.”  
  
Salander’s stomach tightens at the knowledge a stranger has been going through her house while she slumbered. “What was your mother’s name?”  
  
“Does not matter to you. The name that matters is Eve Polastri. I have a photo of her,” she says, pulling out a love heart shaped locket. “...just kidding,” she says, with a smile. “This photo of her is too small. It’s over on the desk by your computer. All of the information you need.”  
  
“What do you want with Eve Polastri?” Salander asks, even though she doesn’t care at all. She extinguishes her cigarette hard in the counter’s brimming ashtray. The coffee machine is about a foot from the knife block. If she throws the pairing knife, and then picks up the cleaver and ducks the first retaliatory shots, she might make it over the bench before Villanelle can recover sufficiently. She steps towards the coffee machine, and notices that every single knife has been confiscated. _Godfuckingdammit._  
  
“I am going to stab her in the stomach and smash up her house. Then we’ll see how she likes it.” The tall woman says something else under her breath, possibly Russian.  
  
Salander makes two coffees. She carries them over to her laptop, nudges it out of sleep, logs in before Villanelle is close enough to read the movement of her fingers. She could email Dragan Armansky. Tell him to shove his supposedly fucking airtight security up his fucking asshole.  
  
Before she can even launch her browser, Villanelle has wedged beside her on the couch, sliding back. The taller woman has an optimal view of the screen, one hand on her coffee, the other on the firearm. Her gun seems lackadaisical, resting on her knee, but Salander can see that a shot right now would take out one of her kidneys. It’s a big gun too, not like that puny little thing that lodged a bullet in her brain. A Sig Sauer, she’s pretty sure.  
  
Lisbeth picks up the file on the desk, stares blankly at the Asian woman, and then begins flipping through the information. She turns on her webcam, takes a moderate quality picture of the passport photograph.  
  
“What are you doing?” Villanelle asks, a little protectively.  
  
“I’ll run it through photo recognition software. It analyzes ratios and geometric information. She may have reused the same photo if she forged a passport on the fly.”  
  
“You can do that with a webcam?”  
  
“A scanner would be better, but I do not have one.”  
  
“Maybe you could go down to the Millenium offices? Mikhail has a key.”  
  
Salander gives a dark look over.  
  
“Or not. You’re the expert.”  
  
Salander’s scowl deepens. “Are you just going to sit there the whole time?” she asks, vectorizing the image. She’s used a program for tracking passport pictures, back when she was after Ronald Niedermann. Not that it had ever been useful. It uses Interpol databases, and would probably land her in prison for the rest of her life if anyone traced her usage. “Do you have any idea of where she might go?”  
  
“America, maybe. I think somewhere English speaking, but not the UK. She is not very good at languages.”  
  
Salander narrows the search to America, Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand. After a moment of thought, she adds several English speaking non-white majority colonies. Maybe this is the sort of woman to hide out in a tropical paradise. She inputs the other information: height, weight. She allows an inch either way, and ten pounds. Hair colour, eye colour. Then, she starts the program.  
  
“It’s running?”  
  
“Yes,” Lisbeth says, finally raising the coffee to her lips.  
  
Villanelle's nose wrinkles. “I could have done that.”  
  
“So you didn't need to bother me after all.”  
  
“You know, I lied. About being your cousin. We’re not blood relatives, but we are related by blood in a different way. My father was gunned down by the Russian mob. I killed his murderers, but I wanted to find where the order originated. I pulled a lot of fingernails that day. Sweden?” she laughs, bubbly and pleasant. “I didn’t believe it for a long time. For many fingernails’ time. And then I did, so I got a Swedish stamp on my passport on my holiday over to kill Alexander Zalachenko.”  
  
Salander’s thin fingers fish a new cigarette from the packet, lighting it and sliding the lighter back onto the coffee table.  
  
“But he was already dead!" the blonde says, animated with her own retelling. "I read in the papers he had a son and daughter, so I thought, hey, maybe I kill his son and his daughter? It seemed about the closest equivalence I had, seeing as he was too old to have living parents. But his son was in a maximum security prison. So maybe I kill just the daughter? And then I kept reading the article, and I decided that would be what the bastard would have wanted. I liked you, Lisbeth. I liked the pictures of you they showed as you were leaving the courtroom, your make-up and your leather skirt. I was going to recruit you," she says, as if paying the highest of compliments. She's finished her coffee, and she sets down the mug without ever jeapordizing her handgun's aim. "But you seemed a little unstable for my line of work. No offence. So I didn't ever get to say hello. And then these past few days, I was having computer problems. Seemed a good excuse to come visit.”  
  
_Visit?_   Lisbeth watches the steady muzzle between the corner of her lashes. Her coffee is only warm now, not enough to make for a painful distraction if she threw it into this woman's face. Her laptop is still indexing. Does it weigh enough to be a decent impromptu weapon? Probably not. Why did she buy such a stupidly fucking thin laptop? Why hadn't she considered she might need the extra weight to break someone's skull open?  
  
“What I’m saying is there would be no risk of incest, which I understand bothers some people. If you would like to have sex with me,” Villanelle finishes casually.  
  
Lisbeth raises a bleached eyebrow, and looks back at the algorithm’s progress. Another estimated two hours, thirteen minutes.  
  
Sexual climax would be an opportune distraction to get the gun away from this psychopath. This very attractive psychopath.  
  
“Fine. But take off that fucking blazer,” Lisbeth says, setting her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray.  
  
Villanelle rolls her eyes. “I was going to take off the fucking blazer.”


End file.
